Ahhh... reminds me of the GTA: Vice City radio commercial for the book series `Think your way to success':
Don't just do it! Think about it!
There even might be something in it. Here I am, reading Slashdot, joking about stuff noone cares about, when I should be thinking about my dissertation.
Re:And on the second day,
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
On the second day? No, it was later. Here's how it went:
On the first day of Krishnah, McBride he sent to me binutils and GCC [in source form, apparently]
On the second day of Krishnah, McBride he sent to me Two broken builds of binutils and GCC
On the third day of Krishnah, McBride he sent to me vi version three Two broken builds of binutils and GCC
... and so on for some verses. Krishnah has many days.
On the 87th day of Krishnah, McBride he sent to me 87 linux source files XFree86 A TI-85 Orwell's 84 A TI-83 A TI-82 81 small furred animals 80 copies of Lion's unix book 79 years of pain: emacs 19 emacs 18 emacs 17 (come on, you know the words!) And a lawsuit as a GCC compiler error message
This announcement for KDE 2.2, suggests KDE had this from version 2.2, released in August 2001. I believe the feature must have been present in some beta versions before that, but not in 2.1.
Unless it goes like this: 'I know I'll be modded down for this, but...' Apparently, if you start your message like that, you can post a UUEncoded mp3-file by Scissor Sisters and still be guaranteed a 5, insightful.
But I'll probably be modded 'redundant' for mentioning this.
But of course, you don't know if Melville did write 'Call me Ishmael' as his first sentence. Maybe he started with his second chapter ('I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag...'), and later found out he needed to introduce his main character better. It's not like you're hanging over Melville's back each time you read the book. In writing, you're not stuck with anything before it's been published.
Your description seems to perpetuate the romantic myth of the work of art as an organic whole, and the artist as some sort of shaman, who works as a medium for the artwork. I'm not saying this is totally wrong -- the artist is probably just as much a medium as the cause of the artwork.
I know I'm replying to a troll, but I'd just like to point out that Mac OS X uses exactly the same printing system you'll find in most Linux distros: CUPS with Gimpprint drivers. It can be just as painfully slow, even when printing through a Windows server.
The problem is that while Windows gets drivers made by the printer manufacturer, Linux and Mac get drivers that don't take full advantage of all the features of the printers. Of course, this has little to do with the OS.
Damn it, I've got mod points, but nobody has bothered responding with anything worth modding up, and you're not wrong, so I'm not going to mod you down. When can I get rid of these bothersome mod points? Oh, well.
The problem with using a non-privileged account in Windows is not so much the OS itself as the applications. Most old applications are not multi-user aware, and even many new ones are plain broken as well.
I think it's been fixed in later versions, but running the Quake 3 level editor as non-admin just didn't work in Windows a couple of years ago. I could use it fine in Linux, as a normal user, at the same time, because no Linux app tries to store the user's files in a directory outside ~/ and so on -- no ordinary app needs special privileges. In Windows, many quite normal apps demand full Administrator privileges for no reason at all, apart from that they were developed for systems that had no privilege separation, or on systems where the developers just didn't bother running as something other than admin and never imagined anyone else would.
The user interface in Windows is not consistent. The preferences panel is in different places in the menu, Notepad has a different look and feel from Wordpad, which has a different look from Word, and so on. Those are just text editing apps from the same company... And no media app looks like another (apart from all the Winamp clones).
The 'problem' is of course worse in Linux, since you also have the inconsistencies between 'legacy' apps like Emacs and vi. You may complain that ctrl-C doesn't work as expected in those programs, but no one will or should care. Apps from both KDE and Gnome uses ctrl-Q for quitting, OpenOffice too, but Emacs uses ctrl-X-C, vi uses:q. You can't change vi to work like a modern 'desktop' program, but you can avoid using it if you don't want to: If you want regular 'desktop' behaviour, you don't want vi in the first place.
I'm even generally more productive under Linux to boot - if it weren't for the abysmal user interfaces available, I'd use it exclusively (note: KDE is Getting There, and quickly).
Interesting. How can you be more productive if the user interface is so terrible?
Not that I actually believe you. What does the user interface in Windows do, that KDE can't? Not much. Nothing that I can remember. But please remind me.
(Writing this from OSX, which is good, but lacked some important things that I could do easily in KDE, before Panther came with Exposé.)
...filters cranked up high only because they do a decent job collecting often interesting news.
The easy way to 5, insightful on Slashdot is posting something obvious, before anyone else does it. The moderation system sucks because people mod up stuff they agree with, and mod down things they disagree with. This leads to that controversial and interesting posts are living a dynamic life between 0, flamebait and 4, troll, and kills real -- intelligent -- discussion. Most people are capable of having an intelligent discussion, but those are quite rare on Slashdot. However, there are some interesting points in between. But no, this isn't one of them.
I ran WindowMaker on a 133 MHz laptop with 40 MB RAM. It was pretty useful. Admittedly, this was with FreeBSD 4.7--4.8, but FreeBSD is only marginally faster than Linux, if at all. It was loads faster than Windows 2K and XP would be, since those wouldn't work at all, but maybe not quite as fast as 98. But then Windows 98 is pretty much a toy.
And when the laptop caught fire, I moved the disk to a 486sx/33 with 8 MB RAM. FreeBSD still ran, but not vey fast. But still, much faster than any modern Windows OS, because it didn't run X at all at this time. And the computer was still very useful to me, which it wouldn't be with any version of Windows. I used it for writing a thesis i LaTeX. Yes, it originally ran Windows 3.11 -- even faster than FreeBSD without GUI, but a computer is hardly any use if it's not connected to other computers. You need net, and for net, you need NIC drivers. And for NIC drivers on a laptop, you need PCMCIA support...
The problem is, you can't compare the speed of OSes directly, at least not from desktop experience. Is Windows faster than Linux because IE opens faster than Mozilla? Mozilla isn't Linux, KDE isn't Linux. And so on. But if you want to, you can make Linux fast enough to be quite useful, most of the time. Beware, though: It might get you accusations of being a CLI snob. Just tell those who accuse you, that it's not only a question of 'the right tool for the job', it's about the best set of tools. The hardware is the basic tool that makes you decide which software tools can work.
I miss the speed, simplicity and stability of BeOS.
Speed and simplicity, yes. It was a damn fast and simple desktop OS. Far too simple for me, I actually prefer KDE on Linux (and I'm writing this from OS X), but I'm not going to argue against your taste. But stable? Compared to Windows 9x, I'd have to agree. BeOS wasn't particularly unstable. But with my limited use, I've had it crash on me more than Windows 2k/XP, which I've spent far more time with. Haven't had a crash with OS X yet, but I've only had my Powerbook for a week.
My problem with BeOS was mostly that there were few good apps, and those that were a bit cool, were all pay-ware. I'd already got used to the loads of free software in Debian, and when even an mp3-player (Soundplay was very nice, but bug-ridden and crashed too easily) cost money, I thought BeOS developers were a bit greedy.
And I must add: discussion of BfC is also impossible because one part (the right wing, I believe) does not want any rational discussion. Sheesh, this comment was +2 last time I checked, now it's -1. Of course, those who modded it down, all used 'overrated'. So they avoid both replying and being smacked down in meta-moderation. Cowards.
It's not so much taken out of context as it is misattributed. My sig. is from Futurama (#12). No, it's not an honest quotation, but then the person it's attributed to isn't a very honest person, and that's pretty much the point.
Hmmm... 'misattribution' is such an ugly word. I prefer 'slander'.
A genuine question for Moore fans: doesn't it bother you even slightly that Moore expects you not to independently verify what he presents as fact?
I'm not exactly a fan, but what worries me in Bowling for Columbine is not his misuse of facts (it's not a factual documentary, its perspective is far wider than something that is documentable in a 2hr flick), but rather that the actual theme of the film always is backgrounded by its critics.
The fact that Charlton Heston didn't say "From my cold, dead hands!" at the Denver meeting has absolutely nothing to do with what the film says by showing Heston say that in the context. Bowling for Columbine is not about Heston, it's about American culture. Heston is part of the American culture, and his fondness for weapons is definately a very American fondness for weapons.
But is Moore's depiction of Heston right? No, Heston is quoted out of context in a very dishonest way. It's dishonest towards Heston, and that's not nice. But Moore's critics don't claim to defend Heston and other people who have been misused in the movie, they claim the movie is a poor documentary: It's factually wrong. But the way they make their claims, is by not talking about what the film is about. They have to ignore its theme to criticize it, and treat it like a documentary about Heston, Lockheed Martin and K-Mart.
Bowling for Columbine is a poor documentary, not because it's factually wrong, but because discussion of it will always be discussion of two different films. Noone will learn much from it, because those who disagree with it will always see it in a way that never challenge their views, and those who already agree will not learn anything because it's factually imprecise.
I think he would pass, even in the beginning. AST was clearly ironic -- he even put a smiley in his post:
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design:-)
Linus would also get a second 'F' for writing i386 specific code, but that problem is long gone. Are there any other OS, apart from NetBSD, that supports as many architectures as Linux?
It seems to me that AST was quite impressed with Linux from the start -- especially the Posix compliance -- but disagreed strongly with the design (or lack thereof). You have to remember that many people actually wanted to turn Minix into something like Linux, and that was out of the question. Linux is not as good for what Minix was supposed to do: teach OS principles. If you consider the context of the discussion, AST does not look as arrogant, and certainly not stupid (although his predictions for the future were a bit off target, but I don't think Linus expected his little hobby to be the subject of a multi-billion dollar suit either).
Use MPlayer. But has RealPlayer really used adware in the Linux version? I've never noticed any when I used it. Maybe there were ads (I use my internal ad-blocking bio-ware to filter those out anyway), but I've certainly never seen any nagware or spyware.
Yeah. But it will also block the harmful effects of bacterias that cause indigestion, the opposite of digestion. This causes a logical paradox that makes the antibacterial powder cease to exist, so the real use of the powder is storage. You can now store infinite amounts of antibacterial powder on food.
I've done some work for a literary journal, and had to open quite a few Word documents in OOo. It usually works well. But at least one of the documents was problematic in Word -- it was a pure ASCII text file with.doc as extension. Most of my colleagues had problems with that one -- Word wouldn't open it at all.
Some of the formatting can get screwed up in OOo, mostly due to different fonts and (possibly) margins, but this shouldn't be much of a problem if the Word user isn't a total fuckwit who presses enter at the end of each line. I only had problems with a couple of graphical poems that consisted of the same letter repeated over a few pages, sometimes with spaces in between. For that sort of text, PDF is the only sensible format anyway.
Try a new version of OOo if the one you had problems with was old, or submit bug reports when possible. I'm sure the developers would love feedback on any outstanding issues.
How in the hell does a present day search engine saturate a fictional liquid metal robot from the future???
Well, that depends on what sort of time portal they use. Now, a T1000 would probably be saturated by a time portal following the Terminator rules: one way only. But Google seems to favour Back to the Future rules, as shown by number of hits:
13,500,000 for back to the future
3,460,000 for terminator
This would make saturating a T1000 a lot easier, since you could saturate it while travelling back in time yourself, or maybe even while standing still in time. This would make Google's bandwidth infinite, as a measly T1000 would stand still. Unless it was using its own time portal to travel back in time to destroy Google, but that would create a paradox, since, as we all know, Google will become Skynet, which will create the T1000 in the first place.
What I'm trying to say is: I don't know, but I'm sure Google could do it.
Upon my last few installs of KDE, after hearing that god-awful sound scheme, I scampered off to the control panel to turn it off. This sort of task should theoretically be easy, right? It wasn't.
It is. Now stop trolling. (Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications. Done).
(1) The interface sucks. Nobody likes working with 16 different open windows
(2) The interface sucks. Nobody likes menus in different windows and toolbars
Well, I happen to disagree. And I'm not very fond of Photoshop's interface. Does that make me wrong?
People do things differently, and have different ideas of how things should be done. There's no interface that is perfect for everyone, because there's no One Correct Way to do graphics art. If you don't like GIMP, fine: use something else, or fork it or whatever. Turning it into a clone of something you are used to just eliminates choice, and I believe at least some people will be unhappy if that happens. I don't want another Photoshop, I want a better (faster) GIMP.
Interfaces are the main reason for the endless Vi vs Emacs and KDE vs Gnome flamewars, and the reason why desktop replacement shells like Litestep and file browsers like Total Commander exist for Windows. We're just never going to agree on which interface is best. (But I can tell you it's GIMP, vim and KDE.)
Slashdot Mirror
There even might be something in it. Here I am, reading Slashdot, joking about stuff noone cares about, when I should be thinking about my dissertation.
On the second day? No, it was later. Here's how it went:
... and so on for some verses. Krishnah has many days.
On the first day of Krishnah,
McBride he sent to me
binutils and GCC [in source form, apparently]
On the second day of Krishnah,
McBride he sent to me
Two broken builds of
binutils and GCC
On the third day of Krishnah,
McBride he sent to me
vi version three
Two broken builds of
binutils and GCC
On the 87th day of Krishnah,
McBride he sent to me
87 linux source files
XFree86
A TI-85
Orwell's 84
A TI-83
A TI-82
81 small furred animals
80 copies of Lion's unix book
79 years of pain:
emacs 19
emacs 18
emacs 17
(come on, you know the words!)
And a lawsuit as a GCC compiler error message
Sorry, I'm not really inspired. Sorry!
This announcement for KDE 2.2, suggests KDE had this from version 2.2, released in August 2001. I believe the feature must have been present in some beta versions before that, but not in 2.1.
Unless it goes like this: 'I know I'll be modded down for this, but ...' Apparently, if you start your message like that, you can post a UUEncoded mp3-file by Scissor Sisters and still be guaranteed a 5, insightful.
But I'll probably be modded 'redundant' for mentioning this.
But of course, you don't know if Melville did write 'Call me Ishmael' as his first sentence. Maybe he started with his second chapter ('I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag ...'), and later found out he needed to introduce his main character better. It's not like you're hanging over Melville's back each time you read the book. In writing, you're not stuck with anything before it's been published.
Your description seems to perpetuate the romantic myth of the work of art as an organic whole, and the artist as some sort of shaman, who works as a medium for the artwork. I'm not saying this is totally wrong -- the artist is probably just as much a medium as the cause of the artwork.
I know I'm replying to a troll, but I'd just like to point out that Mac OS X uses exactly the same printing system you'll find in most Linux distros: CUPS with Gimpprint drivers. It can be just as painfully slow, even when printing through a Windows server.
The problem is that while Windows gets drivers made by the printer manufacturer, Linux and Mac get drivers that don't take full advantage of all the features of the printers. Of course, this has little to do with the OS.
Damn it, I've got mod points, but nobody has bothered responding with anything worth modding up, and you're not wrong, so I'm not going to mod you down. When can I get rid of these bothersome mod points? Oh, well.
The problem with using a non-privileged account in Windows is not so much the OS itself as the applications. Most old applications are not multi-user aware, and even many new ones are plain broken as well.
I think it's been fixed in later versions, but running the Quake 3 level editor as non-admin just didn't work in Windows a couple of years ago. I could use it fine in Linux, as a normal user, at the same time, because no Linux app tries to store the user's files in a directory outside ~/ and so on -- no ordinary app needs special privileges. In Windows, many quite normal apps demand full Administrator privileges for no reason at all, apart from that they were developed for systems that had no privilege separation, or on systems where the developers just didn't bother running as something other than admin and never imagined anyone else would.
The user interface in Windows is not consistent. The preferences panel is in different places in the menu, Notepad has a different look and feel from Wordpad, which has a different look from Word, and so on. Those are just text editing apps from the same company... And no media app looks like another (apart from all the Winamp clones).
:q. You can't change vi to work like a modern 'desktop' program, but you can avoid using it if you don't want to: If you want regular 'desktop' behaviour, you don't want vi in the first place.
The 'problem' is of course worse in Linux, since you also have the inconsistencies between 'legacy' apps like Emacs and vi. You may complain that ctrl-C doesn't work as expected in those programs, but no one will or should care. Apps from both KDE and Gnome uses ctrl-Q for quitting, OpenOffice too, but Emacs uses ctrl-X-C, vi uses
Not that I actually believe you. What does the user interface in Windows do, that KDE can't? Not much. Nothing that I can remember. But please remind me.
(Writing this from OSX, which is good, but lacked some important things that I could do easily in KDE, before Panther came with Exposé.)
The easy way to 5, insightful on Slashdot is posting something obvious, before anyone else does it. The moderation system sucks because people mod up stuff they agree with, and mod down things they disagree with. This leads to that controversial and interesting posts are living a dynamic life between 0, flamebait and 4, troll, and kills real -- intelligent -- discussion. Most people are capable of having an intelligent discussion, but those are quite rare on Slashdot. However, there are some interesting points in between. But no, this isn't one of them.
I ran WindowMaker on a 133 MHz laptop with 40 MB RAM. It was pretty useful. Admittedly, this was with FreeBSD 4.7--4.8, but FreeBSD is only marginally faster than Linux, if at all. It was loads faster than Windows 2K and XP would be, since those wouldn't work at all, but maybe not quite as fast as 98. But then Windows 98 is pretty much a toy.
And when the laptop caught fire, I moved the disk to a 486sx/33 with 8 MB RAM. FreeBSD still ran, but not vey fast. But still, much faster than any modern Windows OS, because it didn't run X at all at this time. And the computer was still very useful to me, which it wouldn't be with any version of Windows. I used it for writing a thesis i LaTeX. Yes, it originally ran Windows 3.11 -- even faster than FreeBSD without GUI, but a computer is hardly any use if it's not connected to other computers. You need net, and for net, you need NIC drivers. And for NIC drivers on a laptop, you need PCMCIA support...
The problem is, you can't compare the speed of OSes directly, at least not from desktop experience. Is Windows faster than Linux because IE opens faster than Mozilla? Mozilla isn't Linux, KDE isn't Linux. And so on. But if you want to, you can make Linux fast enough to be quite useful, most of the time. Beware, though: It might get you accusations of being a CLI snob. Just tell those who accuse you, that it's not only a question of 'the right tool for the job', it's about the best set of tools. The hardware is the basic tool that makes you decide which software tools can work.
If you're going for Google bombing against fake research, you might be interested to know that a search for Alexis de Tocqueville Institution also leads to a more informative article about AdTI.
My problem with BeOS was mostly that there were few good apps, and those that were a bit cool, were all pay-ware. I'd already got used to the loads of free software in Debian, and when even an mp3-player (Soundplay was very nice, but bug-ridden and crashed too easily) cost money, I thought BeOS developers were a bit greedy.
And I must add: discussion of BfC is also impossible because one part (the right wing, I believe) does not want any rational discussion. Sheesh, this comment was +2 last time I checked, now it's -1. Of course, those who modded it down, all used 'overrated'. So they avoid both replying and being smacked down in meta-moderation. Cowards.
It's not so much taken out of context as it is misattributed. My sig. is from Futurama (#12). No, it's not an honest quotation, but then the person it's attributed to isn't a very honest person, and that's pretty much the point.
Hmmm... 'misattribution' is such an ugly word. I prefer 'slander'.
I'm not exactly a fan, but what worries me in Bowling for Columbine is not his misuse of facts (it's not a factual documentary, its perspective is far wider than something that is documentable in a 2hr flick), but rather that the actual theme of the film always is backgrounded by its critics.
The fact that Charlton Heston didn't say "From my cold, dead hands!" at the Denver meeting has absolutely nothing to do with what the film says by showing Heston say that in the context. Bowling for Columbine is not about Heston, it's about American culture. Heston is part of the American culture, and his fondness for weapons is definately a very American fondness for weapons.
But is Moore's depiction of Heston right? No, Heston is quoted out of context in a very dishonest way. It's dishonest towards Heston, and that's not nice. But Moore's critics don't claim to defend Heston and other people who have been misused in the movie, they claim the movie is a poor documentary: It's factually wrong. But the way they make their claims, is by not talking about what the film is about. They have to ignore its theme to criticize it, and treat it like a documentary about Heston, Lockheed Martin and K-Mart.
Bowling for Columbine is a poor documentary, not because it's factually wrong, but because discussion of it will always be discussion of two different films. Noone will learn much from it, because those who disagree with it will always see it in a way that never challenge their views, and those who already agree will not learn anything because it's factually imprecise.
Linus would also get a second 'F' for writing i386 specific code, but that problem is long gone. Are there any other OS, apart from NetBSD, that supports as many architectures as Linux?
It seems to me that AST was quite impressed with Linux from the start -- especially the Posix compliance -- but disagreed strongly with the design (or lack thereof). You have to remember that many people actually wanted to turn Minix into something like Linux, and that was out of the question. Linux is not as good for what Minix was supposed to do: teach OS principles. If you consider the context of the discussion, AST does not look as arrogant, and certainly not stupid (although his predictions for the future were a bit off target, but I don't think Linus expected his little hobby to be the subject of a multi-billion dollar suit either).
Use MPlayer. But has RealPlayer really used adware in the Linux version? I've never noticed any when I used it. Maybe there were ads (I use my internal ad-blocking bio-ware to filter those out anyway), but I've certainly never seen any nagware or spyware.
It's always been a terrible player, though.
Yeah. But it will also block the harmful effects of bacterias that cause indigestion, the opposite of digestion. This causes a logical paradox that makes the antibacterial powder cease to exist, so the real use of the powder is storage. You can now store infinite amounts of antibacterial powder on food.
Thanks. Now I have Tuborg in my nostrils.
I've done some work for a literary journal, and had to open quite a few Word documents in OOo. It usually works well. But at least one of the documents was problematic in Word -- it was a pure ASCII text file with .doc as extension. Most of my colleagues had problems with that one -- Word wouldn't open it at all.
Some of the formatting can get screwed up in OOo, mostly due to different fonts and (possibly) margins, but this shouldn't be much of a problem if the Word user isn't a total fuckwit who presses enter at the end of each line. I only had problems with a couple of graphical poems that consisted of the same letter repeated over a few pages, sometimes with spaces in between. For that sort of text, PDF is the only sensible format anyway.
Try a new version of OOo if the one you had problems with was old, or submit bug reports when possible. I'm sure the developers would love feedback on any outstanding issues.
Hmmm... The enemy of my enemies is confused.
Well, that depends on what sort of time portal they use. Now, a T1000 would probably be saturated by a time portal following the Terminator rules: one way only. But Google seems to favour Back to the Future rules, as shown by number of hits:
13,500,000 for back to the future
3,460,000 for terminator
This would make saturating a T1000 a lot easier, since you could saturate it while travelling back in time yourself, or maybe even while standing still in time. This would make Google's bandwidth infinite, as a measly T1000 would stand still. Unless it was using its own time portal to travel back in time to destroy Google, but that would create a paradox, since, as we all know, Google will become Skynet, which will create the T1000 in the first place.
What I'm trying to say is: I don't know, but I'm sure Google could do it.
It is. Now stop trolling. (Sound & Multimedia --> System Notifications. Done).
Well, I happen to disagree. And I'm not very fond of Photoshop's interface. Does that make me wrong?
People do things differently, and have different ideas of how things should be done. There's no interface that is perfect for everyone, because there's no One Correct Way to do graphics art. If you don't like GIMP, fine: use something else, or fork it or whatever. Turning it into a clone of something you are used to just eliminates choice, and I believe at least some people will be unhappy if that happens. I don't want another Photoshop, I want a better (faster) GIMP.
Interfaces are the main reason for the endless Vi vs Emacs and KDE vs Gnome flamewars, and the reason why desktop replacement shells like Litestep and file browsers like Total Commander exist for Windows. We're just never going to agree on which interface is best. (But I can tell you it's GIMP, vim and KDE.)